Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [602]
Though weddings and wakes were often celebrated at saloons, they were mainly centers of rough male conviviality. Amid a fog of tobacco smoke, men drank and spat, cursed and quarreled, played cards and told tales and offered toasts to the likes of Daniel O’Connell. The men treated one another in turn, spending lavishly what little they had to demonstrate their honor and bonhomie.
Lost honor, conversely, rapidly led to barroom brawls. Taverns became sites of ritual battles, in which men aired out personal quarrels, displayed courage, vindicated honor by shedding blood, and sustained reputation by demonstrating ferocity and support for chums. Macho touchiness, often heightened by differences of religion and ethnicity, made defending cultural turf a matter of personal—or collective—pride. Volunteer fire companies also offered a chance for real heroics and colorful display, and in the 1850s immigrants joined them in large numbers (the Irish were 14.7 percent of the firemen in 1850 and 37.8 percent in 1860). Battles between these volunteers escalated as well, in part because Irish immigrants brought over from Connaught and Munster the Gaelic peasant tradition of faction fights.
Neighborhood ethnic-based gangs, headquartered at a saloon or corner liquor grocery, also afforded opportunities to bolster identities in the metropolitan flux. Fights between gangs, especially at times of nativist anxiety, could be ferocious affairs, featuring stomping, brass-nailing, eye-gouging, and nose-biting their enemies. Guns began to appear too, for by mid-century cheap, concealable revolving pistols were becoming available. Yet the code of the streets still decreed that a true reputation for grit and toughness had to be won barehanded. And it was precisely the value placed on fisticuffs—by immigrant and native alike—that accounted for one of the Bowery’s most spectacular contributions to the larger life of the city.
THE MANLY ART
Organized boxing (as opposed to mere brawling) originated in eighteenth-century Britain, where it appealed to both plebeian respect for raw physical courage and aristocratic fascination with ritual combat. Immigrants and merchant seaman brought the sport across the Atlantic in the early years of the nineteenth century, and during the 1820s a handful of prizefights took place in the United States. Around the same time, New York gentlemen began to experiment with “sparring” when William Fuller built a gym in the city and offered to teach law-abiding citizens to defend themselves on the streets against “insolent ruffians and blackguards.” Respectable opinion in the city ran strongly against the brutality of the ring, however, and local authorities exerted themselves to suppress scheduled bouts (in 1824 the King’s County sheriff had dispersed a Coney Island crowd with bayonets).
Fed by ethnic and communal rivalries, “the detestable practice of prize fighting” continued nonetheless to grow in popularity. After 1840 boxing contests and exhibitions became weekly events in New York, thanks in large part to the arrival that year of James “Yankee” Sullivan, an Irishman who had a minor career scrapping in the London prize ring. Sullivan set up the Sawdust House, a Bowery saloon where pugilistically inclined immigrants could slake their thirst, watch a fight or two and swap stories about the great bouts of bygone days.
Two years later, on August 29, 1842, ten steamboats ferried more than six thousand people to Hart’s Island in Long Island Sound for a bare-knuckle fight between Sullivan and William Bell. This was a rendezvous guaranteed to grab public attention, for not only was Bell an Englishman,